cosmopolitan justice – فَاسْتَبِقُوا الخَيْرَاتِ إِلَى الله

The Guardian newpaper’s liberal imperialism

See John Hilley [While Israel kill Gaza’s children, media shield the truth about Hamas] on the Guardian‘s continued vilification of Hamas by carrying an advert by Israel-supporting figures depicting Hamas as biblical equivalent of sacrificial child-killers, reinforcing the view of Hamas as a “terrorist organisation” rather than a democratically elected government (following a the insistence by Israel and the US from democratic elections in Gaza [25 January 2006] that would undermine Fatah’s position, who at the time had lost their favour). Thus liberal space in the newspapers is being used essentially to condone Israel continued murder of Gaza civilians including children just for being voters of Hamas. Open link

This compares with the Sunday Times changed tone over the Gaza conflict, being more open to justifying Hamas’ actions [10th August 2014]. Open link

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/article1444832.ece

In fact, the Sunday Times, seems here to have broken the normal false narrative by the British press of the Middle-east conflict which is, in John Pilger’s words, “… that there are two equal sides, and the on one side of this equal relationship in the ‘conflict’, as they say, the Palestinians [‘unworthy victims’] are attacking the Israelis…” [see John Pilger’s interview with Afshin Rattansi on the British media’s historical manipulation and distortion of facts in regard to foreign conflicts on link: http://rt.com/shows/going-underground/177516-western-media-victims-uk/, in which Pilger reminisces about the extraordinary ‘objectivity’ of the reporting from the Soviet Union in 1918 by Morgan Philips Price, the reporter in Moscow (ironically) for the Manchester Guardian, as the Guardian was then called].

But in the same breakthrough issue [10th August] of the Sunday Times‘, we also find frank coverage of Sayyeda Warsi’s actions during her resignation, and her loud condemnation of the Conservative Party over their stance on Gaza, as well as reporting on the associated subject matter of the Conservative Party’s frankly bleak prospects at the next election

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/article1445052.ece

Developments which show that the conservative press in the UK is more balanced than the liberal press in its foreign reporting, in the sense of being more open to views from outside the “metropole”, is noticeable in the Daily Telegraph‘s reporting on middle-eastern news, with as an example, its critical coverage of the David Cameron decision to “lead a review into” the Muslim Brotherhood [in the context of the war against terror]

This early [2nd July 2014] article predates the eventual outcome of this “review”, which showed that there was no cause for concern, or even that there could have been any original basis for the review. In fact the Financial Times on 18th August in its article “Whitehall report into Muslim brotherhood delayed by wrangling“, talks about the fact that we should be more concerned about the UK government’s links with the Emiratis and the Saudis who insisted on the “review” of the Muslim Brotherhood in the first place, and who have overseen the funding of, if not at times directly funded, what has become ISIS, those nihilist takfiris who are terrorising the Middle-East at the moment.

But its not only on the subject of the Middle-East and Israel where the Guardian seems to plug the perspective of the “metropole” and its élites, it has also been traditionally unbalanced in its coverage of Hugo Chavez and Venezuela, displaying a perhaps surprise antagonistic streak towards “Bolivarian Socialism”. Open link to see a letter of complaint to the editor from 2012